I bought a very special Restaurant

I didn't know if I'd ever say this again, but welcome back to another video, folks. It's been a while, hasn't it? And a lot has happened. The farm has started up again after I've had a year's break and a lot has changed here. But I've also just bought a fantastic new farm restaurant venue for events and things like that. And so I thought it's only fair, after hundreds of you have been emailing me throughout the year wishing that I do longer form videos again to give you a little update on both the farm and the restaurant and the plans we got for all these things. I had been exploring the idea of moving towards Stockholm, where I first landed when I came to Sweden 10 years ago in search of a new property and a new adventure. Having got a bit tired of some of the things that I've been doing year after year here. And I was exploring looking at property over there. But property is extremely overpriced near Stockholm to the order of 10 times what it would be here. And I've already paid the mortgage off on this farm as per the business plan I set out with. And the land is not so nice. I much prefer the habitat and the climate out here. The soil is more workable and the landscape more beautiful, the wildlife more beautiful. And I also a big sucker for the west coast and to be able to live near the sea. But for it to be the Baltic Sea was not something I was best pleased with. The Baltic's not the nicest of coasts when we have the west coast, which is incredibly stunning. And so at some point in the winter last year we came back here and I decided that one of the main reasons that I was considering moving away was to be near more vibrant culture. It's quite sleepy out here in the countryside and being a foreigner in the countryside with a very busy summer season when most of the social activity is happening, it's always been a bit of a problem. But I've designed the farm to run in a different way this year. That's really facilitated the sort of balance that I've been looking for. And I've decided that I need to create the sort of cultural space that I want people to gather and hang out in. One thing I learned is you can't put a farm like this down for a year. There's so much maintenance that needs to happen. And it took the first couple of months just to get things back in basic order again. And I kind of shot myself in the foot by making it a short season to ease back into things and not having my employees here in the initial setup. So I ended up lumping, you know, everything on myself after taking some time out from the farm, which was not the smartest idea, not a mistake I'd want to do again. But then we started the year with building this incredible sand garden. I'm going to roll on some clips of the construction of that. This is something I can talk about in a longer form. Video. If you want to see a video specifically about this, let me know in the comments below. So after the initial drought and desperate watering of this to get it established, we were soon into the farming season and we've brought back cows and sheep and laying hens in our egg mobiles as well as boilers to the farm as well as getting the market gardens kicking up and producing amazing veg again. We've hosted a whole number of trainings, bringing back Anders from Norway to do holistic management training as well as our internship programs which are super oversubscribed. We've got all our new trainings for next year up on the website already. If you want to find out about them, see the links below. And bear in mind our online Regenerative Ag Masterclass is also launching very very soon. If you want to be in to join us for the eight week lifetime access nutrient dense online training, the best value thing I can offer you. I think a big highlight from this year for me was to run a 10 year reunion where people from all over the world came to meet again and meet people from different years at the farm. And that was such a lovely time. A little sort of festive networking and hearing what people are up to. I've decided to run that every year so that anyone that's been to the farm before, either as staff or on a training, can come back and join us and spend a few days feasting, connecting with people and just keep growing this beautiful network we've built of people engaged in amazing projects all over the world. For me a lot has been about finding life balance with running this busy farm and educational hub, writing books, producing videos, all the sort of work that I used to do. In the past. I've let some of that go and found a lot more balance. Where I actually get weekends off. I get a lot of afternoons in the weekdays to be with my kids. I've been finishing this lovely summer house on the natural swimming pond behind me so I can host friends and people and really finding a lot more balance. It's the first year running the farm that I haven't felt stress at all during the season. And we've even managed to donate tens of thousands of euros of product to people that really need it. Refugees, unemployed people, homeless people. And that's been really touching to me and the team this year to see the best quality food you can imagine going to the people that really need that nutrient density the most. Part of what's made it so easy this year is the incredible team. I'm so blessed by all the incredible people that pass through the farm and my life here. But having Ollie and Sabina and Dermot and then later Victor as an incredible farm management team has just been a real blessing. And it's been super, super fun to just have more space and time, be able to really connect with people in a deeper level. We're all working on our inner regeneration as well as the land and habitat around us. And it's been a really special theme of this year and really beneficial for a lot of people passing through. And big news for me is that Victor's actually moved in. And after many years of trying to offer people opportunities to stay longer term at the farm, that's been the biggest issue for me is having to start with a brand new team every year. And in the old days when we were doing very high level of production, that was very stressful because all of that management and all of that financial stress came back on my shoulders essentially. And having Victor move in, he's bought a beautiful property at the far end of our local lake with his family and they're going to move in in a couple of years. But he's moving back in November and he's going to be my right hand man for the coming years. And I'm so blessed by his presence here. Everyone's loved having Victor around. He's a very sensitive, humble, skilled and intelligent guy. And I couldn't think of a better sidekick for these next chapter as we move on to our beautiful restaurant and event space here. This is silly, Gordon. I want to tell you a bit about it. I'm sure you're all excited to see inside, but a little bit of history. This place has been built by an artist over 100 years ago and had thermal baths here on the edge of the great Lake Freeken here. This is up in the village, about 7 km from the farm and it was a farm and they had a restaurant here. Always serving fish from the lake here. It's a very deep lake, it's over 100 meters deep and it goes all the way from Karlstadt to Torsby. It's very, very long lake. And it's got a dance hall over here and workshops and it's even got a couple of houses down the bottom here. There's six hectares of pasture going down to the lake and there's over 30 beds that they've used as hotel in the past. But the restaurant is a real beautiful space. We used to come here for Fika, which is a Swedish coffee break when it was running. But it's been sitting empty for the last couple of years. But it's a majestic place with these incredible buildings, incredible location. And so I finally, after a couple of years talking with the owners, have signed a deal and we've purchased this place. My plan for a long time has been to start to do food events so that hundreds of you can gather from around the world and experience the farm, eat the farm, meet each other and work on that. You know, connecting people to place through food and through meeting each other. And I couldn't think of a better place or venue to do that than here at Siligordn. In Swedish that means the herring farm, but we like the name and we're keeping that. But we want to bring this place back to its former glory. We want to turn the entire car park into a beautiful sand garden like you see at the farm. So even the car park when you come in is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. We want to put in no dig veg beds and flower beds. We want to bring grazing animals to the land here. I've overlaid some drone shots so you get a sense of, of the beautiful landscape sloping down to the banks of freakin net. But it's really the buildings here that are still painted by the original artists over 100 years ago that make this feeling and the sort of vibe of this place so alive. I'm going to take you inside, have a look. So as you come in, there's a really nice big kitchen. It's a bit outdated and we're going to modernize this, which is obviously going to cost quite a bit investments. But this is the main indoor dining hall. And you can see it's all beautifully painted 100 years ago. Even the chairs were built by the artist's, I think brother and painted by another of the artists. So it's really stunning feeling in here and I don't think videos can capture this properly because it's got a majestic feeling feeling. And it's actually on three stories. I'll just show you into the veranda here. So we're looking out at the gardens towards the lake. And you have this beautiful terrace that gets the morning sun, but it's actually on both stories we're going to be putting in. And there is already ornamental gardens out here, but we can make those a lot more beautiful. If I spin you around. Let's go up the stairs. And you can see there's another terrace up here and the windows open up into the roof. And so you can have music events. And we're thinking of doing a two pronged approach. We're going to have events for local people to gather and eat and drink and listen to amazing music. We want to bring some of the top artists internationally here to this rural location, partly for the young people's sake, because there is nowhere to hang out and not much culture to speak of, or certainly not what I'm after. So we decided we'll create it. Just look at that though. It's amazing the resources we have here. And upstairs there's a little turret which can be VIP space looking down over the whole farm and lake. Unbelievable. We're not going to be opening until next summer. It's a lot of work to plan a place like this, all the different licensing and regulations. We want to do some renovations, we want to put our little touch on the place. But it's a lot of planning to make a place like this work. And as you can imagine from the likes of our farming, we're not going to be running it in a conventional way. We're going to be doing things a little different here. Many of you will have read our cookbook Farm Fish Hunt, Pick, Bake and that's a year round guide to eating, preserving our food from the farm and from the wild. And it's really that same approach we want to bring to the restaurant here, which I think is going to be quite unique for higher end restaurants. Farm to fork kind of service, where literally everything is going to come from the farm or from the wild that we foraged ourselves, even down to the salt which we're going to harvest from my place on the west coast and create our own salt. We don't want to be using olive oil, we don't want to be using fruits from the other side of the world. We want literally to craft the very best, nutritionally dense, super tasty, super beautiful food out of what's in season right here in that time. And I think that's quite unique for this kind of setting. We're going to have long tables in the pasture with people meeting new friends from all over the world. And I'M really excited to be able to welcome folks to come and check this space out and learn more about farming and regenerating each other through these kind of experiences. So this building has been functioning as a shop in the past. Probably originally was a farmhouse, but it's a beautiful shop and could be a reception used at events and things like that. This building is really special. This was also muraled, but it's fading away now. But hopefully we can get all of these paintings restored. And this is a bit of a dance hall, but it's got this lovely Western kind of feel with the veranda here. Everything is old, but very beautiful. I'm just gonna make it wide angle here. You can see this is an incredible space that's been used for weddings and dances. Beautiful. And we want to bring life back to this place and host people again. And I think what sums it up for me is this painting down at this end. We want to create the cheer and gathering together of people again. This image really speaks to me of what we're going to do here. So those of you that follow the channel over the years know I love to talk about money and finances, facts and figures, so I'll share a little bit about this process with you. This place, I think it was very reasonably priced. I purchased this for about €500,000. Now, that's a lot of money and far more money than I had. I've had to borrow nearly everything at a bit quite, quite high risk to myself to make this possible. But if I think in European context, that's extremely cheap. If this place was near Stockholm, it would be, you know, 10, 20 times the price. And if it was in somewhere else in Europe, it would equally be ridiculously priced. And I couldn't bear to see an iconic place like this be torn down or developed in an unartistic way. It feels like no one else was going to buy this place. It's been sat empty for two years with no offers on it. And so I feel really grateful and privileged to be able to take this place on. And I think it's really great that we get to take it on because we're probably the only people that would bring back the farm and restore some of its former glory whilst taking it in a new direction too. So I'm really excited for that and to bring people and farming and food back to a central part of community. And so we're going to run this in two sort of ways. We're going to have an inward, local summer season where it's aimed at the local people in the village and surrounding towns. But then we're going to run global feasts and we're going to bring 2, 300 people together at a time to meet each other, form new networks, see the farm, eat the farm and celebrate together in really visually spectacular feast. That's some of what we're going to do. We'll be announcing more as we go, but I thought the best way to launch this place and to get some of you folks involved and feel like you're part of this next chapter and dream is coming to life for us here. We want to run a very special launch event that you can come to the farm, you can come to a feast here. You can see all the places that you've seen in these videos over the years and become part of this global network. I feel so privileged to have this mycelial network all around the globe of some of the most fascinating, engaged and exciting people I've ever come across. And so we'd love you to be part of that. We're going to announce details of that as soon as we know them, but stay tuned. In the coming weeks we'll be announcing a Kickstarter where you can come and be a part of this historic moment. Thanks so much for watching folks. And don't forget, as always, in the links below you can find details of where to buy all my different books. We only sell them direct from the farm still, please don't buy them off Amazon or resellers that are trying to make money out of you. The best place to buy our books is direct from us. We ship them out all over the world to nearly 100 countries. Now we're launching the sales for the tickets to my online regenerative agriculture masterclass any day now. That's our eight week lifetime access. One of a kind, unique training in this field. It's the best value training I can offer, so check the links below. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks for your support over all these years and it's good to be back on YouTube.